This is Haylee. I met her online recently and was given permission to share her story. Shes 16 years old and has been suffering with Anorexia Nervosa (binge purge subtype) for 10 years now. She has permanent heart problems, shes has 2 heart attacks since January, and was in a coma in March. Shes constantly in the hospital due to her eating disorder, and shes spent 7 months in the hospital this year. It’s come to my attention that there are a lot of people on tumblr with “pro-anorexic” blogs who seem to WANT this disease and give “tips” to their followers to “become anorexic”. I want you to look at this photo, at this young girl who has wasted 10 years of her life in agony and ask yourself, how can you be pro this? How can you encourage others to do this to themselves? Please reblog this and help it get around to other blogs to show the reality of eating disorders and the pain they cause and put a stop to “pro anorexia” blogs.
SO glad someone finally made a post like this. Please reblog.
Those blogs infuriate me like I cannot describe. Someone I love and who is very close to me suffered from bulimia and anorexia, and still struggles with an irrational, nigh unbeatable loathing for her own body. She is one of the most beautiful people I know, and has always been. It literally breaks my heart that she can’t look through my eyes when she stands in front of the mirror. She has been managing her situation for the last few years, but still there are more hard, bad days than good ones. Every single day is a fight with her own body and mind, and it tears her up.
I am the person who has always been in her life, skinny and slim like she thought she wanted to be. I ate what I wanted, as much as I wanted, and never gained. I hated it, and still do. But I was also, unwittingly, the specter in front of her every single day, being what she could not. For years, she blamed me secretly for being thin when she couldn’t attain it, and destroyed her body in the attempt. And then it wasn’t secretly.
I had never been so shocked, horrified, and dismayed in my life. It rocked me from the foundation. She was slowly killing herself. And it was my fault? When I loved her so much and envied her beauty and her normal body weight, her curves? To this day, and probably ever onward, there is a mix of frustration, crushing guilt, and bewilderment in me about this.
Why would you do that to someone on purpose? What in the bloody FUCK possesses a person to deliberately encourage a person to do themselves such profound harm, to despise themselves in so irrevocable, all-consuming way? There is no endgame but DEATH in that. I know this disease. There is never satisfaction. There is never an attainable goal. Nothing can ever be right, or good enough, not even close.
And these people just… glamorize and promote it. Shamelessly. Not just their own, tragic self loathing and self harm, but they want you to hate yourself with them, to starve and torture and internally maim yourself alongside them.
How fucking dare you?
This girl, Haylee, and my loved one, and all the others, deserve to be safe from that sort of vicious, greedy poison. I cannot stop anyone from doing that to themselves. I cannot even stop this person I hold so dear from seeing herself as ugly and fat, and she has never been either of these things.
What I can do is try to protect them from the selfish desire of others to drag everyone they can reach into that black hole of despair and endless hopelessness with them.
You “thinspiration” assholes should be ashamed of yourselves.
And yet, simultaneously, I hope someday you can get the help you need to begin your own long road to recovery. All I know is that you will never do that when you are participating this circle of pain and starvation. “Thinspiration” isn’t any kind of inspiration at all. It’s horrible, awful, to you and to everyone you reach with it. Take a step in finding health and self-acceptance, and take yourself out of that loop.
Please.
